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Australia’s plan to make a digital representation of everything

By Olivia Solon

IF KNOWLEDGE is power, then some Australians may be about to become very mighty indeed. A bold 10-year programme run by the country’s national research agency CSIRO aims to record everything that happens in the environment and make it immediately available to everyone in real time.

The agency wants Oznome to become a “historical, current and future digital representation of everything” in the country by 2025, starting with environmental data. “Like the Human Genome Project, Oznome is a big crazy idea that many people will say isn’t possible,” says David Lemon, a team leader at CSIRO.

Making it happen will involve finding a way to bring together data from government agencies, researchers, private companies and citizen scientists to offer an unprecedented understanding of how systems connect with each other – whether that’s water, energy or agriculture, health or economics. In the long run, historical data from Oznome could be used to make predictions.

“This is kind of the dream for any of us that work with data,” says Jeni Tennison, technical director of the Open Data Institute in London. “But it’s really, really hard to do.” It’s both a technical and a cultural challenge: how to build a platform that allows easy data sharing, and how to get people to share their data.

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There are ways of making it work. Under a similar initiative in Tasmania called Sense-T, sensors have been placed across the island to measure real-time weather, carbon dioxide levels, the health of animals and farmed fish, water reserves and energy use.

“It’s fascinating to see what a community does with access to information in a form they can consume,” says Lemon. “To me, this is a taster of what’s to come with Oznome.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Australia plans to track Earth data in real time”